What makes the site quietly unusual is not just its remoteness but its informality: unlike many early Irish monasteries, this one was never defined by a formal enclosure. Instead, the community that once gathered here shaped the landscape itself to suit their purposes, cutting terraces into a hillside that drops sharply to the east and using the natural geography, a crag to the north-west, a large rock to the south, a line of boulders, as the boundaries of their world.

The settlement, on the south-east end of Inishvickillane, groups its principal features across roughly half an acre. The rocky bluff behind it, reaching 453 feet at its highest point, offers limited shelter from the prevailing Atlantic winds. Within the site, a small oratory, a graveyard, a leacht (a low commemorative stone cairn associated with early Christian devotion), and a holy well are arranged across three irregularly shaped enclosures defined by combinations of drystone walling, boulder lines, and terraced ground. The northernmost enclosure, measuring approximately 21 metres east to west by 17 metres north to south, contains the oratory and graveyard, and formerly held two cross-slabs and an ogham stone inscribed with a cross, ogham being an early medieval script in which letters are represented by notched lines cut along a central stem. A stone font and a stone lamp were once housed inside the oratory itself. A possible house-site occupies the central enclosure, while the western half of the broader settlement area has been disturbed by the later construction of a water reservoir. The description of the site draws substantially on J. Cuppage's 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, published under the title Corca Dhuibhne.